AI That Can Collaborate and Negotiate With You

Today, we’re announcing CICERO, the first artificial intelligence (AI) agent to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy. Diplomacy has been viewed as a nearly impossible challenge in AI because it requires players to understand people’s motivations and perspectives, make complex plans and adjust strategies, and use language to convince people to form alliances.

CICERO marks the beginning of a new era for AI that can collaborate with people in gameplay using strategic reasoning and natural language processing, and the learnings from technology like this could one day lead to intelligent assistants that can collaborate with people.

While CICERO is only capable of playing Diplomacy, the technology behind it is relevant to many other applications. For example, current AI assistants can complete simple question-answer tasks, like telling you the weather — but what if they could hold a long-term conversation with the goal of teaching you a new skill?